Little project with a bit of a backstory. I originally created a very similar image back in 2006 using POV-Ray (link to original post on povray.org). The POV-Ray version took me six months to make, evenings and weekends, and around 3 days to render.
I had a couple of days off work last week and tried to reproduce it in Blender just to see how hard it would be. It took me two days and the final render was 2 hours on a mac in Cycles using CPU. That’s roughly 90 times less effort!
That’s insane. Does that mean you’ve been doing 3d art since 16 years or so?
Probably longer, but only off and on as the mood takes me.
It’s quite funny that ideas like non-destructive workflow which are gaining traction now are actually the original way things were done. POV-Ray is a programming language for describing images, plain and simple, so there’s no question or even concept of a destructive operation. The product is the instructions to create the image. Here’s another [POV] image of mine that plays on that idea, the code that made the picture is part of the picture:
Of course the downside is that procedural modelling is always going to be more difficult, sometimes vastly more. It’s nice to have both options.
You have some dedication. Six months on one project! wow
Things weren’t as easy back then 
, the expectations of effort were different. There’s a POV equivalent to the “Hello World” program, with it’s own acronym “RSoCP” (Reflective Sphere on Checkered Plane) which was everyone’s first challenge. That could easily take a beginner a day or more to figure out. Though I guess most people’s first image in Blender would take them a while, beyond just hitting render on the default cube.
Now I’m really interested. Were you into Renderman Shading Language back then? I recently bought an old book about RSL and was surprised by how many amazing shading concepts are actually explained so well in the book which is helpful regardless if you write shaders or not.
I can totally relate. When I started in my teens I didn’t have internet access and didn’t speak English. It was really clicking and see what happens. No wonder I haven’t done anything meaningful until now
Renderman certainly rings a bell, though I never used it, I thought it cost $$$. If you’re in to shaders then one good resource is The Book of Shaders It’s a WIP but what’s there so far is interesting.
Another little goldmine I found recently is the Blender OSL shaders source on Github which is actually very readable if you’re already familiar with the nodes in question.
I featured you on BlenderNation, have a great weekend!
Wow, that I was not expecting. Thank you very much!
